What Have Merchants Gained From Payment Card Antitrust Litigation?

In recent years, federal antitrust enforcers and businesses that accept payment cards have been waging a slow war against payment card fees and the card network rules that protect them. The payment card industry's antitrust battles are nothing new, dating back to antitrust lawsuits against the predecessor to Visa in the early 1970s. But more recent developments began to provide tools for businesses that accept payment cards (referred to as "merchants" in the payment card world) to slowly chip away at the effect of those fees on their bottom lines. That progress has recently taken a major step backwards.

In June of 2016, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York threw out the watershed settlement between the payment card industry and merchants, including $7.3 billion in damages and the controversial release of claims against VISA and MasterCard in light of the divergence of interests among the merchants in the class. Moreover, the Second Circuit had under